Who Goes There!

"Had you forgotten?" she asked, still with the forced smile.

"No."

"Do you still mean to do it?"

"I told you that I had to have the papers."

"Yes, and I told you that I should make it as difficult as I could for you. And I'm going to. Because I don't want you to go." She laughed, then sighed very frankly: "Of course," she added, "I don't suppose I could keep them very long if you have made up your mind to take them."

"Is that your idea of me?" he asked, laughing.

She nodded, thoughtfully: "You take what you want, sooner or later. There is no hope in opposing you. You are that kind of man. I have learned that."

She touched the orchid to her chin meditatively. "It surprised me," she added. "I have not been accustomed to authority like yours. I am my own mistress, and I supposed I was accountable to myself alone. But – " she lifted her eyes, "it appears that I am accountable to you. And the realization does not seem to anger me very deeply."

He looked away: "I do not try to control you, Karen," he said in a low voice.

"You have done so whether or not you have tried. I don't know what has happened to me. Do you?"

"Nothing," he said, forcing a laugh. "Except you are learning that the greatest pleasure of friendship is a confidence in it which nothing can disturb."

"Confidence in friendship – yes. But confidence in you! – that ended in our stateroom. Without confidence I thought friendship impossible… And here I am asking you not to go away – because I – shall miss you. Will you tell me what is the matter with a girl who has no confidence in a man and who desires his companionship as I do yours?" Her cheeks flushed, but her eyes were steady, bright, and intelligent: "Am I going to fall in love with you, Kervyn?"

He laughed mirthlessly: "No, not if you can reason with yourself about it," he said. "It merely means that you are the finest, most honest, most fearless woman I ever knew, capable of the most splendid friendship, not afraid to show it. That is all it means, Karen. And I am deeply, humbly grateful… And very miserable… Because – "

The entrance of Frau Bergner with the breakfast tray checked him. They both turned toward the long oak table.

Fortunately the culinary school where the housekeeper had acquired her proficiency was not German. She had learned her art in Alsace.

So the coffee was fragrant and the omelette a dream; and there were grapes from the kitchen arbour and ham from a larder never lacking the succulent by-products of the sanglier of the Ardennes.

Frau Bergner took his letters and telegram, promising that Fritzl should find somebody with a bicycle at Trois Fontaines to carry the other note to Lesse Forest.

She hovered over them while they ate. The breakfast was a silent one.

Afterward Karen wrote a number of notes addressed to her modiste in Berlin and to various people who might, in her present emergency, supply her with something resembling a wardrobe.

Guild had taken his pipe out to the fountain, where she could see him through the window, seated on the coping of the pool, smoking and tracing circles in the gravel with a broken twig.

She hurried her notes, called the housekeeper to take them, then, without taking hat or gloves, she went out into the sunshine. The habit, so easily acquired, of being with Guild was becoming a necessity, and neither to herself nor to him had it yet occurred to her to pretend anything different.

There was, in her, an inherent candour, which unqualified, perhaps unsoftened by coquetry, surprises more than it attracts a man.

But its very honesty is its undoing; it fails to hold the complex masculine mind; its attractiveness is not permanent. For the average man requires the subtlety of charm to stir him to sentiment; and charm means uncertainty; and uncertainty, effort.

No effortless conquest means more to a man than friendship. And friendship is nothing new to a man.

But it was new to Karen; she had opened her mind to it; she was opening her heart to it, curious concerning it, interested as she had never before been, sincere about it – sincere with herself.

Never before had the girl cared for a man more than she had cared about any woman. The women she had known had not been inferior in intelligence to the men she knew. And a normal and wholesome mind and heart harbour little sentiment when the mind is busy and the body sound.

But since she had known this man she knew also that he had appealed to something more than her intelligence.

Vaguely realizing this in the crisis threatened by his violence, she had warned him that he was violating something more than friendship.

Then the episode had passed and become only an unquiet memory; but the desire for his companionship had not passed; it increased, strengthening itself with every hour in his company, withstanding self-analysis, self-reproach, defying resentment, mocking her efforts to stimulate every tradition of pride – even pride itself.

Deeply conscious of the power his personality exercised over her, perplexed, even bewildered at herself, she had not only endured the intimacy of contact with him, but in her heart she accepted it, cared for it, was conscious of relaxation and contentment except for the constant array of traditional indictments which her conscience was busily and automatically finding against her.

She could not comprehend why what he had done had not annihilated her interest in him; why she, even with effort, could find in her mind no abiding anger, no scorn, no contempt for him or for what he had done.

And because she was intelligent and healthy, in her perplexity she had tried to reason – had found nothing to account for her state of mind unless love could account for it – and knowing nothing of love, had admitted the possibility to herself and even to him. Intelligence, candour, ignorance of deeper emotion – coupled with the normal mental and physical innocence of a young girl – this was the character she had been born with and which had naturally and logically developed through nineteen years of mental and bodily cultivation. The girl was most fatally equipped for an awakening.

He stood up when she appeared, knocked out his pipe and advanced to meet her. He had been doing a lot of thinking. And he had concluded to talk very frankly to her about her friendship with him – frankly, kindly, discouraging gaily any mistaken notion she might harbour that there could be any room, any reason, any fitness for a deeper sentiment in this friendship – anything more significant than the delightful and frank affection now existing between them.

"Shall we walk in the forest, Karen?" he said.

"Yes, please."

So they turned into a sentier which curved away through a fern-set rabbit warren, over a wooden footbridge, and then led them on through alternate flecks of sunshine and shadow through a noble forest of beech and oak.

The green and brown mast lay thick under-foot, premature harvest of windfalls – perhaps the prodigality of those reckless sylvan spendthrifts, the squirrels and jays.

Here and there a cock-pheasant ran through a spinny at their approach; rabbits scuttled into wastes of bracken as yet uncurled and unblemished by a frost; distant crashes and a dull galloping signalled the unseen flight of deer. Now and then the dark disturbance of the forest floor betrayed where the horny, furry snouts of boar had left furrows of fresh black earth amid the acorns.

They came upon the stream again – or perhaps a different little brook, splashing and curling amid its ferns and green, drenched mosses. Stepping stones crossed it; Karen passed lightly, surely, on little flying feet, and stood laughing on the other side as he paused to poke about in the pool in hopes of starting a trout into arrowy flight.

When he crossed she had seated herself under a fir, the branches of which swept the ground around her; and so utterly had she vanished that she was obliged to call him before he could discover her whereabouts.

"Under this green tent," she said, "if I had a bed, and some books, and clothes, and food, and my maid and – a piano, I could live most happily all summer." She laughed, looked at him – "if I had all these and —you," she added.

"Why drag me into such a perfect paradise?"

"I shouldn't drag you," she said gravely. "I should merely tell you where I lived."

"I didn't mean it that way."

"You might have, with reason. I have demanded a great deal of your time."

"I have demanded all of yours!" he retorted, lightly.

"Not more than I was content to give… It seems all a dream to me – which began when you rang the bell at Hyacinth Villa and roused me from my sleep. And," she added with a gay flash of malice, "you have kept me awake ever since."

"And you, me!"

"Not a bit! You slept in the railway car."

"So did you."